“How was I to know what she was planning?” I say.
Dorian shakes his head and puts his hand under Holly’s arms.
Although the rain is still drubbing the boat, the wind has settled, making sailing smoother. Dorian, Holly, and Song doze in their corner. Bruce and Maude are whispering and caressing each other’s wrinkly hands. Silas is at the wheel. I go to him and stare out at the river through the cracked window of the cabin. Dilapidated buildings along the embankment have spilled into the river after decades of neglect. “You should have let her jump.” His voice is low.
“Are you serious?” A lump swells in my throat. Are our chances of survival that slim?
“Dorian claims to know where Sequoia is, but when I showed him the map, he was pretty vague. As far as I can work out, we’ve a search radius of around ten miles.”
“We’ll find it. We’ve done harder things, Silas.”
“I’m not sure we have. How long do you think our oxygen’s going to last?” he asks. I glance across at the stack of airtanks and then at Maude and Bruce wheezing in their facemasks. Maude looks up at me and, for no particular reason, scowls. Despite what we’ve been through together, we still aren’t friends.
“We have a few days,” I say.
“If that.” Silas keeps his eyes on the burnt sun.
“Do you have a better idea?” I ask. I’m not being argumentative; I really hope he’s thought of something.
He shakes his head. “Sequoia’s our only shot at not being drifters. If we find it, we can resume planting and make contact with the pod, with my mom and dad.” He stops and looks at me. His eyes are red-rimmed, though whether it’s from the foam the Ministry’s army used to destroy The Grove, tiredness, or despair, I can’t tell.
I take Silas’s arm. “Harriet and Gideon are fine,” I say. Even if a civil war has broken out in the pod, my aunt and uncle are too smart to be dead.
A blast of wind pitches the boat toward the bank and Silas pulls the wheel sharply to the left. I’m thrown off balance and fall onto my face. A thick, metallic taste fills my mouth.
“Sorry,” Silas says. “You all right?”
“Fine,” I say. I lift my facemask and wipe away the blood with my sleeve. Under the circumstances, it would be childish to complain about a split lip.
Maude starts up. “Stop!”
I am about to snarl at the old woman, tell her Silas is doing the best he can to keep the boat steady, and turn just in time to see Holly sneaking out the cabin door. I dash after her. “Holly, no!”
She is already at the bow, climbing over the railing. By the time I reach her, she’s hanging over the water, jostling from side to side with the current. And she is smiling. Silas’s words rebound in my head—You should have let her jump. But I can’t. She isn’t in her right mind.
“You’ll feel better tomorrow, Holly.” I hold tight to one of her arms. Ice chips from the freezing river nick my face.
“Nothing will be different tomorrow,” she says. She turns briefly and catches my eye. “Everything’s gone.”
“We have to hope,” I say.
Holly laughs mirthlessly. “I’m all out of hope,” she says, and lets go. The railing bites into my chest as I’m wrenched forward. I hang over the railing, gripping Holly’s arm, but she’s heavy and my hands slide to her wrist. A violent spray from the keel drenches her. She gazes up at me with a look of perfect serenity. My fingers burn. “You’re hurting me,” she says. And then it happens: her wet skin slips from my grasp.
Holly hits the water and is devoured. And all I can do is watch.
Heavy footsteps pound the deck. “Holly!” Song cries. He leans over the railing and searches the waves breaking against the hull.
But Holly is gone.
I turn away.
Everyone but Bruce is on deck, staring at me.
“I couldn’t hold her,” I say.
“Holly?” Song howls.
Dorian puts an arm around Song, and pulls him back from the railing.
“We’ll dock for the night,” Silas says. “Now everyone, back inside.”
Silently, we file into the cabin. I slide onto the floor. One of Holly’s brown boots is lying next to the pile of airtanks, the laces loose and frayed.
I will not feel guilty. I couldn’t hold her. It was her decision to die. I close my eyes and press my knuckles against the lids.
I no longer feel cold. I feel nothing.
“Poor girl lost the fight,” Bruce says to no one in particular.
And I am left to wonder: What are we fighting for, anyway?
2
BEA
Sometimes I wished I believed in God, like people did before The Switch. Knowing there was a grand plan and that someone you loved wasn’t gone forever must have given them a lot of comfort. But even if my parents are in a better place, God couldn’t reverse time and bring them back and that’s what I want: the chance to hug my parents, to smell my mother and father again.
When I pined for Quinn, I thought I knew what people meant when they talked about having broken hearts. I didn’t know a thing. Now, my insides are all eaten up. My heart pumps what little oxygen I have around my body, but the breath doesn’t make me whole.
Even though it’s covered in slush and lumps of ice, Quinn, Jazz, and I are following an old railway line from The Grove into the center of the city. From there we’ll track the river west. I have the old map Gideon gave me before I slid out of the pod, and Jazz has fingered a place on it she thinks is Sequoia. We have to trust she’s right because we don’t have another choice.
Quinn puts an arm around my waist and squeezes me. “Maybe we should rest,” he says. He must hear me wheezing through my facemask, but this isn’t a safe place to stop. The temperature is dropping with the sun, so we need shelter, but the graffiti-covered buildings around us look like they’re about to topple. I shake my head and without asking me, he turns the valve on my airtank to allow more oxygen into my mask.
But there’s no knowing how long it’ll take to get to Sequoia. When he looks away, I turn it back to fifteen percent.
“A tunnel!” Jazz chirrups, pointing at an underpass a few hundred feet ahead. She bounces away, kicking up the slush with her feet as she goes.
“Be careful!” I call out. I pull the map from my coat pocket and unfold it for what must be the hundredth time. “There should be a train station after the tunnel. Saint Pancras,” I tell Quinn. He takes our moment alone together to hold me. Without meaning to, I stiffen.
He steps back. “You all right?”
“I wish we’d found more people alive,” I say, diverting his question. I don’t want him to worry, and there’s nothing he can do to sweep away the cinders of grief anyway.
“We’re going to get through this,” he says. I nod, pull the beret Old Watson gave me over my forehead, and smile weakly.
“Stop smooching and hurry up!” Jazz insists. She’s already way ahead. She pulls her facemask down over her chin—having grown up at The Grove and spent her life training her body to subsist on low levels of oxygen, she doesn’t need to wear it all the time. She spins in circles, opening her mouth to the sky. Her spirally red hair, singed at the ends, blazes like fire against the snowy backdrop. You’d never know she was the one survivor we found in the rubble that was once her home.
Quinn takes my wrist and forces me to look at him. “Against the odds, we got out alive and found each other.”
“I just wish . . .” I think of my parents’ motionless bodies, their blood spreading across the stage as the fighting broke out. I was all they ever had and they worked every day of their lives just to pay the air tax, so I could breathe. Thank goodness I have Quinn . . . but I want them, too.